NATHAN NEWMAN

Anti-Union Yale

How anti-union is Yale? Yale University this year has provoked its
eighth strike since 1968. It's hard to think of ANY major employer in
the country that has provoked eight strikes in 35 years. Despite
media images, most union contracts are settled without a strike, yet
Yale seems incapable of recognizing any union or signing any contract
without subjecting the workers, the students and the whole New Haven
community to a strike.

The most recent strike happened the week of March 2 when 4000
Yale University workers walked off the job for the week in protest of
Yale's refusal to negotiate a new contract for existing workers and
its refusal to recognize the union formed among graduate student
teachers and at Yale-New Haven hospital. And Yale has still refused
to sign a contract or recognize the new unions as workers have turned
to other means of pressure on the University.

Speaking to a New York Times reporter, Ron Altieri, an
electrician at the university for 27 years, described why Yale has
such harsh anti-union attitudes:

"They're such an elitist institution," he said. "They just look
down at the workers. They can't come to terms with looking at their
unions as an equal."

The maintenance and cafeteria workers union (Local 34) and
clerical workers union (Local 35) had to go through painful strikes
to even be recognized and get a first contract with Yale. Now Yale,
is shocked, shocked, that those unions are trying to act in
solidarity with graduate student teachers and Yale hospital workers
who are trying to organize:

"The strike is a way of demonstrating that these four unions are
all pursuing an agenda -- an organizing agenda," [Yale
President] Levin said. "I believe we could reconcile our
differences with Locals 34 and 35 relatively easily if they decoupled
the organizing issues from the issues of the contracts."

Where does this kind of unenlightened attitude come from? Well,
part of it is supported by the Yale Law School whose dean, Anthony
Kronman, in the words of a Chronicle of Higher Education article, is
"the poster child of unenlightened administrators" with his published
assaults on the very idea of unionization, especially for graduate
students but apparently for most professional workers of any kind.
Dean Kronman published an editorial in the New York Times that
essentially argued that unions are about producing mindless
automatons, where individual achievement was impossible and where
membership was incompatible with having "distinctive views and
voices."

When the top legal advisor on campus has such a repugnant
viewpoint on workers rights, it's hardly surprising that the
university feels license to defy the community and the law.

Finishing a law degree at Yale at the time, I was personally
outraged at Kronman's comments, but it really just reflects the
pervasive disdain many in the educated class have for the privileges
on which their "distinctive views and voice" is built, and why unions
are required to even get most workers even basic freedom of speech in
the workplace.

Or maybe many of the academic elite at places like Yale do
realize it and just want to restrict the privileges of speech and
voice in society to those with credentialed degrees and high status.

This is confirmed by a study by Restructuring Associates Inc., a
firm that Yale President Levin and the unions jointly hired to study
labor relations on campus. In the finished report, RAI noted:

"Employees describe what they perceive as a caste system at Yale.
Those not directly involved in intellectual or pedagogical pursuits
feel consigned to an underclass Employees have almost no input
into discussions and decisions that directly affect their work."

And it's clear that administrators at Yale are rankled by having
to descend from their cloistered meetings with scholars, presidents
and corporate CEOs to actually meet with their servants as equals in
collective bargaining.

But unions are about solidarity. If Levin won't recognize the
power of his own workers, he's now being confronted with that of the
whole national union leadership, with visits to New Haven by AFL-CIO
President John Sweeney pledging the full support of unions across the
country. He described New Haven as a "community that struggles as a
sea of poverty and joblessness and injustice surrounding an island of
selfishness and plenty" governed by the Yale elite.

The AFL-CIO is mobilizing people across the country to help
pressure Yale to settle with existing union members and recognize the
graduate student and hospital workers unions. A simple step anyone
can take is to write letters to Yale at the online action center: See
www.unionvoice.org/campaign/levin_settle/.

Help bring the Yale leadership down from their academic cloisters
to the reality of labor solidarity.

Nathan Newman is a labor lawyer, longtime community activist
and author of the just published book Net Loss [Penn State
Press] on Internet policy and economic inequality. Email
nathan@newman.org or see www.nathannewman.org.